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Category: Conformity Crisis

Friendship is something that we all share with someone to varying degrees, and under a variety of circumstances. Friends, true friends, should be able to go through thick and thin, no matter what the obstacle. The greater the obstacle, the quicker one will find out who their friends are. With that said, with the recent divide and conquer left-right paradigm political climate that always takes place during election, lots of friendships were tested.

Recently, noticed myself that a lot of people kept throwing other individuals they considered ‘friends’ under the bus, simply because those people employed varying beliefs. Saw this take place literally dozens of times over the last six months, and it’s quite mindboggling to say the least. In fact, it’s still taking place to some extent.

All of these issues make me wonder if the virtue of friendship hasn’t been cheapened, when compared to what it was like in the past, when say, people like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were friends. Mind you, Tolkien and Lewis, although sharing much in common, did not agree on everything.

This increasing pattern makes me wonder whether or not what people call friendship nowadays is nothing more than a shell of its former ideal.

Ironically, the very people throwing others under the bus for being who they really are, are themselves the ones demanding other individuals to respect those very same qualities. Talk about hypocritical!

In a world where people gain ‘friends’, seemingly with every new minute, it does seem that to some extent the quality of friendship/acquaintances has been cheapened. But perhaps, by that very nature, when true unbounded friendship is achieved, it is vastly more meaningful than it ever could be.

It seems with time, more and more people just want others to be a clone of themselves. They want to talk to a mirror for the rest of their lives. They want the mirror to reply, exactly how they themselves would reply.Every. Single. Time. That’s a highly disturbing proposition.

What’s the world coming to when other people want to literally program you to be who they want you to be? Perhaps, this is taking place because from the bottom up, that’s exactly what the system does to us.

From youth, the public school system has taught society how to conform in astounding degrees. This can be seen here, here, and here. So it’s no wonder that now the people that have been conforming their whole lives want others to conform. That doesn’t justify what’s taking place, but it helps shed a shred of light unto this conundrum.

Regardless of that, however, if there’s one positive thing to take from this it is that, if someone’s not your true friend, they will just be an anchor upon your ship, and hold you back. Nothing positive can come from someone that wishes you to conform, regardless of what you believe. That simply shows these people did not respect nor value the friendship and what it truly means.

Just as a ship can’t move while being held back by the weight of a broken anchor that can’t be pulled back, some individuals won’t be able to move forward through life with people holding them back in similar fashion. That’s why it’s vital to breakaway from toxic relationships.

After all, those who really are your friends, deep down inside, will never put you through such circumstances. In fact, they will go with you above in beyond, through hell and back and always be there, right by your side, to the end – because that’s what true friendship is about.

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This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Zy Marquiez and TheBreakaway.wordpress.com.

“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.
We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen — of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”[John Taylor Gatto, quoting John D. Rockefeller Sr., Occasional Letter Number One, General Education Board 1906, In Weapons Of Mass Destruction, p. 8]

John Taylor Gatto has been doing yeomen’s work in the field of education for quite some time, and with good reason. Gatto has fiercely spoken out at length countless times about the systematic issues that are inherent within the bowels of the corrupt public schooling system.

The passage that follows is from his incisive book, Weapons Of Mass Instruction, which details one of these very disturbing and growing issues.

In his words:

“I remember the shock I felt the first time I discovered, quite by accident, that I could personally negotiate larger discounts on book purchases (or anything else) than the school district could. It didn’t seem to make sense. The most personally troubling occasion was the moment I decided to use my own funds to purchase classroom sets of good books for student use rather than rely on the “approved” list of books for which school funds could’ve used, and which required many months, if not a full year, to pass through the acquisition protocols to be shipped. Traveling to a book wholesaler, open to anybody, to secure its standard 40% discount, as I stood at the cash register with a hundred copies of Moby Dick and a hundred copies of Shakespeare’s Plays in shopping carts, the checkout clerk asked me, “Are you a school teacher?” Without thinking I nodded affirmatively, after which she rang the books up at 25% discount.

“You’ve made a mistake,” I told her. “The discount is 40%.”

“Not for schoolteachers,” she replied curtly. And when I bellowed in angry protest, she became indignant. “Look,” she said, “that’s the discount your Board of Education negotiated. If you don’t like it, take it up with them.”

Now why on Earth would my employer sell out my rights to a standard discount? Can you think of any reason that isn’t crooked? And, of course, it wasn’t only my right to full discount the school authorities had stolen, but every teacher’s right in New York City. Perhaps, this will help you understand why I tilted this chapter “Everything You Know About Schools Is Wrong.”[1][Bold Emphasis Added]

There is so much wrong with this, that much more can be said. We will digress for now, however, as more examples will follow in the upcoming days.

For additional reading about this disturbing trend please research the following books reviewed below from teachers that are either still working within the public schooling system, or worked within the public school system at one time:

The following books are crucial tools for individuals who wish to become autodidacts & self-directed learners, homeschoolers and anyone else interested in learning valuable skills not mandatory in public schooling:

[1] John Taylor Gatto, Weapons Of Mass Instruction, pp. 20-21.
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This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Zy Marquiez and TheBreakaway.wordpress.com.

“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen — of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
– [John D. Rockefeller Sr., Occasional Letter Number One, General Education Board

In previous posts [here and here] were shown the downright nonsense that students have to go through. Below, additional evidence is shown illustrating why children’s test scores and intelligence keeps plummeting [as shown here], and its rather troublesome to say the least.

The example stems from the book, Drilling To The Core, which details a wide-ranging set of issues revolving around Common Core:

“In 1995, a student-teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote a letter to the editor of the Star-Tribune complaining about radically dumbed-down curriculum. She wrote that 113 years earlier fifth-graders in Minneapolis were reading William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Caroll, Thomas Jefferson, and others like them in the Appletone School Reader, but that today:

What’s stated above can be verified. This was part of what older curriculums of true education – TRUE EDUCATION – involved, rather than what the facsimile of what we have now.

Education a century ago involved much higher standards than it does now, and its showing. Not only have new studies shown the US Ranks 31 out of 35 developed nations in Math, but it also ranks 24th in reading literacy and 25th in science.

If the trend doesn’t change, all future generations will not only be stupid, but intellectually destitute, which is its true purpose, as can be seen here.

The only way to change that is now.

And the only way that will change is with individuals becoming proactive.

Don’t let your children settle for the parody of education we have now, for there are better alternatives.

The only way individuals will reach excellence, is by pursuing excellence.

It’s been done before, and in much harsher conditions, and with much less information available.

There are individuals out there that whittle facing the storm, and there are those who challenge the storm. John Taylor Gatto is one of the latter.

John Taylor Gatto is the former NY City and NY State Teacher of the year [1991], where he inspired his students to achieve some amazing results through his nontraditional methods of instruction.

Not only has Gatto been relentless in detailing many of the inherent issues within the public school system for quite some time now, but he’s had the courage to take it a step further and detail that all of the issues within public schooling are not mistakes, it is done by design.

Within Weapons Of Mass Instruction, John Taylor Gatto breaks down Alexander Inglis’s book Principles of Secondary Education, which “..makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrated into a dangerous whole.”[xviii][Bold Emphasis Added]

Furthermore, as author notes that Inglis, who has an honor lecture in education named for him in Harvard, breaks down the natural purpose of schooling into 6 basic functions,” which are as follows:

1. The adjective or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority…It is also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2. The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a larger labor force.

3. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper role in society.

4. The differentiating function. Once the social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5. The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races…Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will be quietly taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.” [xviii-xix][Bold Emphasis Added]

And just in case some wonder that Inglis was alone in these thoughts, he was not. Horace Mann, James Bryant Conant, George Peabody, and many others shared the same sentiments.

Expressed above and incisive, and yet disturbing words is nothing more than Social Engineering from the bottom up, at a national scale, beginning with the most malleable minds in the land – those of children. It doesn’t get any more cut and dry.

John Taylor Gatto is one of the few individuals out there whose wisdom seeps into all societal strata. His words should be heeded, because the issue is only exacerbating [link] year after year.

In life, an individual can choose to write their own script, or be part of someone else’s.

And as we can see, if those in control of the system carry out their plans of mass conformity and control, children, an all future generations, will never write their own authentic scripts unless they breakaway from those proverbial shackles.